At the age of 14, Holly Austin Smith ran away from home with a man she met at a mall and was forced into a sex trafficking ring. Smith will be one of the two main speakers at tomorrow’s National Crime Victims’ Rights Week Conference in Union City.

The conference, sponsored by New Jersey Crime Victims’ Law Center and the Hudson County Office of Victim and Witness Advocacy, will take place at the North Hudson Higher Education Center, 4800 Kennedy Blvd.

Smith’s nightmare in 1992 was short-lived. She was found after one night by police officers, who took her home. The man she ran away with served only one year in prison for the crime, Smith said.

Now 34, she advocates for stricter anti-trafficking laws and greater protection for survivors.

A couple from Poplar, have been been jailed for a total of 16 years April 27 2012 for trafficking women into the UK and forcing them to work as prostitutes.
Snaresbrook Crown Court heard that Sandra Malina, 22 and Ainars Zvirgzds, 44, lured women from Latvia and Lithuania with the promise that they could get jobs in massage salons, and that sex with the clients was optional.

The prosecution case was that when they arrived in the UK, their passports were taken off them and they were sent to work as prostitutes. It was alleged that the women were beaten by their captors, and threatened with a gun, if they refused to comply.

Not to be bought and sold for sex should be a human right. Sweden effectively recognized this in 1999, criminalizing buying sex and decriminalizing being in prostitution. This law has been adopted in full by Norway and Iceland, partly in Korea, Finland, Israel and the United Kingdom. France may enact it.

The Swedish model recognizes that prostitution is an institution of inequality. Most people in prostitution enter as children after being sexually abused. Lacking education and resources to survive, often destitute and homeless, they are easy prey to pimps and johns. Sexism and racism lock them in, as in the United States, where African-American women and girls are overrepresented in prostitution, as are native Canadian women in Canada.

Prostitution generally inflicts such trauma that escape is virtually impossible without social support. A study of 854 prostituted persons in nine countries, indoors and outdoors, found that 89 percent wanted to escape prostitution but felt they could not, and that two-thirds met clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress equal to that of treatment-seeking Vietnam veterans and victims of torture or rape. A Korean study in 2009 found prostitution strongly related to post-traumatic stress, even controlling for prior childhood abuse.

On Friday Night the Lifetime Network aired a two-hour America’s Most Wanted special on Sex Trafficking in America. For those who missed the episode, below are some highlights of a very moving, relevant, and compelling episode.

The show featured actual sex trafficking victims and their painful stories. Although the way in which these individuals were forced into the sex trafficking trade differed, one sobering thought was clear after hearing all of their stories; sex trafficking can happen to anyone.

One young girl who was being abused by her grandfather “met” a man on a social networking site. He promised her that he understood her pain and offered to fly her out for a visit. She was tricked and then forced into becoming a sex slave from then on until she managed to runaway one day.

A 14-year-old girl from Mexico was lured into the sex trafficking trade based on a lie that she was being taken to the U.S. for a job at a restaurant in Texas. Her “pimps” were not stern on birth control, which meant her “Johns” would impregnate her and the pimp held her responsible for her own abortions.

People are flocking to an eye-opening new exhibit in Washington. It’s called “Can You Walk Away” And it’s aimed at increasing awareness of human trafficking here in the United States.

Angie says on camera, “The guy decides he wants me and so um I got back there and, you know, I just have to just pray to God to just please help me, just please let me get through it you know.”

Angie came from a good family in Wichita, Kansas, but when she ran away with a pair of friends, she ended up under the control of a pimp, turning tricks at an Oklahoma City truck stop. Angie says, “He had grandkids as old as us….and all I could think about the whole time was how my grandpa could be this guy right now and how that would feel and I just wanted to die.”

Angie’s story is part of an exhibit on human trafficking at President Lincoln’s cottage in Washington. Lincoln Cottage director Erin Carlson Mast says, “We really wanted to do this exhibit on modern slavery at President Lincoln’s cottage for the 150th anniversary of Lincoln working on the Emancipation Proclamation right here at this seasonal retreat.”

Sexual exploitation is caused by exploiters. This isn’t a revolutionary idea, but it’s one that our culture buries in favor of other messages, especially when it comes to the sex trade. Just think about the last time you saw a news article about prostitution. Undoubtedly, it was accompanied by stock images of women wearing high heels, or mug shots of women who were arrested and charged criminally. What most articles do not explore is that many of these women are victims of sex trafficking, which happens when someone uses force, fraud or coercion to recruit or keep that woman in the sex trade.

Most johns (men who buy sex) know that they cause harm when they support the sex trade, but they continue to buy sex because they face very few consequences. I know this because I conducted a studythat interviewed 113 johns in Chicago, and only 7 percent of those interviewed had ever been arrested for buying sex. When men are targeted by law enforcement it’s called a “reverse sting.” Why is it a reversal to arrest purchasers?

It’s a reversal for our culture because purchasers are men, and as a society we have always blamed women for prostitution. This needs to change. If there were no demand, there would be no prostitution.

Girls wearing almost nothing at all, suggesting all sorts of sexual acts, listed on page after page of Backpage.com’s escorts section. When she looked closer at the photos, she noticed something eerie.

She could recognize the rooms.

Ritter is a meeting planner at Nix Conference and Meeting Management of St. Louis. She and her co-workers work with 500 hotels around the world and visit about 50 properties annually. She can identify many hotel chains used in escort ads by their comforters, bathroom sinks, air conditioning units and door locks. Sometimes, she can also identify a specific property.

The Jakarta Police cyber crimes unit told the Jakarta Globe that the 19-year-old madam, identified only as M, was taken into custody along with seven underage girls in a hotel room in the capital as part of a sting operation.

Officers masquerading as potential clients arranged a meeting at the South Jakarta Hotel by masquerading as potential clients on the via the Facebook page, where they were also able to peruse albums and prices for various girls.

The girls allegedly charged between 800,000 and 1.5 million rupiah ($75 to $150) for sexual services, almost half of which went to M, senior police commissioner Rikwanto told The Saturday Age.

Cyber crimes unit head Audie S. Latuheru said police believed M had operated the prostitution racket for the past two years.

She recruited girls aged between 16 and 20 after befriending them in shopping malls in the poorer areas of Greater Jakarta, luring them with the promise of a big income.

“I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude” said the lawyer (of Dominique Strauss-Kahn).

“The definition of a prostitute is a woman who sells her pussy for money, a woman who gives it away for free is a whore” said the pimp (from the South Side of Chicago).

For my upcoming documentary 10,000 Men I have spent two years researching and interviewing all the players in the business most still call prostitution, but correctly should be called sex trafficking. I have heard so many specious arguments to justify “the world’s oldest profession” or that “boys will be boys” it’s hard to tell whether I am listening to a high-powered lawyer or a career criminal.

Does any of this matter? And if so, to whom? The law? A judge? A jury of one’s peers? The press? To a woman or girl under violent pimp control it surely does.